A touch more WWS – clarification

Add me to the fan club along with BRK. And at least my squeeing was in private as I was contacted by email. Oh, that’s obscure. OK, I’ll unpack.

I have said before how excellent I think WoWWebStats is. And I know the developer, Lossendil, has continued to make improvements. I stared, gasped, and squeed the other day when I got an email from him asking for healer-related suggestions. While I’m going to keep most of that discussion out of your grubby little hands — no, seriously, there IS soap by the sink — I also thought to ask about something which had me confused.

Healer focus. What the HECK was healer focus telling me? Here’s his answer:

As for the focus, it is “the number of players who received 50% of the heals of this healer”. The focus ranges from 0.5 to half the number of players in the raid.

A focus of 0.5 means the healer healed one and only one player.
A focus of 1 means the healer spent 50% of its heals on a single player.
A focus of 2 means the healer spent 50% of its heals on two players (could be 30% on MT2, 20% on MT3, and the remaining 50% spread on all the raid)
A focus of 12.5 in a 25 man raid, means the healer divided its heals
evenly between all players in the raid.

Coolness. Now I can USE that number more effectively besides knowing generally that 1 is nominally better than 1.5 (all I’d really figured out from what was written). Oh, it’s not perfect understanding, but it’s a heck of a lot better.

By the way, a quick summation of my recommendations:

I wished there was a way to pull mana use information. I was told there used to be, and probably will be again after 2.4 .

I wished for a means of determining when healers were overlapping (and so ‘wasting’ one of their heals). I was shown a concept (that works brilliantly) and then told it’ll have to wait till a graphics frame was finished (sigh) which will be “soon”. (Oh! YAY!)

So I finished by reiterating that for healers, evaluation is a matter of quality, not quantity (in my opinion, of course). For quality, there is the gross measure of overheal which is used already. All my other measures of quality are measures of efficiency and timing. Efficiency is pretty constantly a matter of mana conservation – so long as the heals are being made, is mana being used and recovered in an efficent fashion. And timing… are my heals late? Oh, sure, my target isn’t dying, but could I be doing a better job of anticipation? For that matter even if my target DOES die, how far back did and should I have noticed he or she was in trouble?

Doing ENOUGH heals JUST IN TIME. That’s perfection. That’s the numbers I want to extract. We’ve got gross heals, we’ve got gross overheals. But mana and timing… those are what I want next. And according to Lossendil they’re coming.

Is it just me or is the number scheme really stupid? Why are we measuring 50% healing so that a score of 0.5 matches with healing 1 person?

0.5 => 1
1 => 2
1.5 => 3

Right? That seems very confusing. 50% healing is arbitrary right? So assume that number can vary depending on you preference that day and we’ll call it Y healing. So we want to count the number of people who got Y healed. That number should start at 1, not 0.5.

About…

I've experience with many priests of many races and specs on several servers. The more I play, the more I realize how much I do not yet know. This is a share of some of what I have learned.
My main these days is Zingiber on the Undermine server.